Posts by David Newall

New outlook

New outlook doesn't display shared mailboxes for my users.

They win this time

but they have to win everytime. when we win once it sets a precedent, which is hard to reverse.

Does not say exploit

It says 3xpl0it. Should have decoded the hex properly to reveal all its 1337 glory.

I'm Satoshi and so is my wife

is what he didn't say, but perhaps he's really Craig Wright and that's the drive he told the Norwegian court that he'd stomped on. Stranger things have happened.

Actually, no, they haven't.

Datum needs to be in a big data centre

Edge computing is a fine idea and I support it wholeheartedly. The problem with it is that bandwidth is thin at the edge, power is unreliable, environment runs hot and dusty, and the hardware lacks error correction. Not always, of course, but, say, 99.99% of it.

Social networks could be engineered to allow the data to keep appearing and disappearing, but, my god that would be hard. What they can't do is analyse and aggregate petabytes of data across thin, highly contested links.

There's a reason Google and Facebook have bigger and better networks than AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon, and more computer power than IBM and Microsoft. It's because they can't operate any other way.

I lament that it's so.

landlord overreach

"hired by the multi-tenant building owner who was worried about the inhabitants being "a little too relaxed" about office security"

I feel as if this is not appropriate. Heart in the right place, but he was conspiring to break in to offices that weren't his, and that's not okay.

latency 1.7 times lower

Something 0 times lower latency has the same latency. 0.5 times lower would be half the latency. 1 times lower must be 0 latency, a cool trick indeed. 1.7 times lower latency must mean traffic arrives before it was sent, which reaches Thiotimoline-like spookiness.

CSIRAC

I'm endlessly fascinated by old kit.

CSIRAC, the oldest complete first generation digital computer, is on display in Melbourne's Sciencework museum, and I'm sorry to say it's such a disappointment. I first saw the machine in the Melbourne museum, where also was displayed a filmed oral history, from his hospital bed, by one of the inventors; sorry, I forget which one and can't find the film on the Web.

The exhibit at Melbourne museum was awe inspiring. You could walk around and through it. You could see the mercury storage tubes, a magnetic drum and disk, and, well, all of it.

Alas, at the exhibit at Sciencework is very disappointing. Many of the goodies, including meet tubes, drum and disk, are hidden against a wall, and they've added some ghastly light sequence to flash lights on a control panel. No doubt that hints at what it looked like in operation, but I don't like it. It cheapens what is one of the most important, if not the most important, historical computer exhibits in the world.

None the less, it's a thrill to stand in the presence of this artifact.

Why was he sacked?

and why didn't he live the comfortable life he could have enjoyed on his golden handshake?

It's fair

70 hour weeks should be common, as should $300,000 starting salaries.

well...

Witless wonder wields welder when warning watsit working.

Thumbs up

I totally support SSL-related M$ software borkage. Their software is awful at the best of times, so it saves angst when it fails on startup. #FOSSforever

Are flying cars a good idea?

I'm concerned about hordes of them pulling over to the side of the sky while they wait for a repair truck; long queues, waiting for lights to change in the skyways; sky rage; and particularly, the energy required to lift a couple of tonnes of vehicle into the sky, only to throw it away on the downward trip.

What virtualised workloads need

In my experience, IOPS is more important than MHz. The relatively slow clock speed is okay, but I wonder if Chinese servers built using Loongson will have fast I/O.

io or polyfill?

With io domain being bought by funnull, and shenanigans about where they are based, is it polyfill.io who's doing something nefarious or funnull? Certainly if the io domain is running amok, polyfill.io might be blameless.

Also, at 0136 UTC, polyfill.com does not resolve. The article implies it should.

World war

It's depressing, but I've come to accept that we're in the first stage of war. Adversaries of freedom are attacking their neighbours, the leaders of freedom are trying to appease but are being dragged into overt action, which will escalate into full blown hostility.

Yes, I'm looking at you, Russia, but also North Korea, Palestine and Israel, and a slightly circumspect China who is eyeing Taiwan and a lot of the rest of SE Asia. Germany and USA are lurching to the right, NATO may fracture, a criminal will probably sit in the Whitehouse, and I despair at where it ends.

Nowhere good.

Blonde moments

Users can be really stupid, and I don't mean willfully. They can genuinely not see our understand the obvious.

I took a support call once, I don't remember what the issue was but the lady could not seem to navigate through the menus. Even 0 enter 0 enter 0 enter failed to get her to the main menu. The screen stayed the same. In desperation, I asked her to press the secret, magic debug key combination. She said it was still the same. But, when asked if the screen now displayed "Debug: H)ex edit, F)iles" and so on, she allowed that it did. In fact, that was the only thing displayed, and she had never used the magic debug key before, so, in her mind, "same as before" meant "wonder-filled and different".

I can't remember if I hung up on her or kept helping. I'd like to say it was the latter but I've got such little patience for fools that I probably did hang up on her. At least I didn't swear.

Rewritten firmware

I noticed a graph in the report showing 250000 increase in other when Sagemcom dropped by 600000. Seems possible to me that a large number of victims have no idea.

Language evolves...

... sometimes in awful ways. My current pet hate is "incentivize". I wish there was a real word, and that people were motivated to use it. Dare I dream?

Big purple

Snigger

We all pay for the ads

In the good times, web pages were tiny. Images would be measured in low kilobytes and total load time in tenths of a second. Now, it's common to load multiple images into carousels, each being tens of megabytes, and JavaScript nonsense libraries which are just as big. Load times takes many seconds, even tens of seconds.

I value my bandwidth, as well as my time, and I'll be dammed if I let advertisers steal either.

It's not only ads that bloat webpages, but they are a main contributor. I hardly ever see ads because I use NoScript (why would anybody run programs served by unknown and unwanted third and fourth parties?) and my load times are generally sub-second. Plus, I sometimes see interstitial gaps where the ads don't appear.

How it looks

The optics are not good

No surprise

Didn't everybody predict exactly this outcome? Denying China access to US technology was merely a stumbling block for them. Soon they'll have developed their own technology that's cheaper, faster, smaller and uses less power, and they'll be the supplier of choice except for companies under the US government's thumb. USA forced China into their soon-to-be enviable position. I think that's called karma.

I was called to Tasmania and the only flight available was first class. And it was lovely.

Numbered styles don't work

Though I say it through gritted teeth, Microsoft's office is better than LibreOffice in styles for numbered paragraphs. Microsoft's just works exactly as you'd expect, Libre's doesn't work in any sense.